They could all be in the same 8K, because 65-family I/O chips have a CS1 and a CS2\ or similar combination. The CS\ can go to a 138's output pin and the CS can go to a lower address line, meaning you could have lots of these I/O ICs on a single '138 output. There will still be a lot of repeat addresses though, and there still may be lots of room left for additional RAM. My workbench computer has 16KB RAM, 32KB ROM, and 3 6522's and 3 6551's using only a 74ACT00 (quad NAND) for address decoding for the whole thing. If there were room on the board, up to four more I/O ICs could be added, using the same simple address-decoding circuit.

Care to share the EPROM dump?

Lee.

Yea after 30 years, I think its time that little 4k block of code sees the light of day.. It will be a while till I get that far with this project but stay tuned.. I'm kind of lacking equipment around here, So it will take some time to improvise a method to dump it..

There are quite a few revisions of the program eprom, Hopefully more people with this robot will see this forum and add to it..

_________________
When falling from a high place, You might as well try to fly

It looks like this is quite a popular platform ..

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=microbot+teachmover

user mcmptk is Mark P McCrate who wrote the pdf linked previously.

Lee.

Glad Its Popular.. Maybe someone who has already hacked one of these will chime in with some info and save me allot of time..

Well I fired it up the first time today..
First Problem: I have to cycle the power 20+ times till it boots.. It freezes with various LEDs lit that would not light together in normal operation.. It acts like the crystal is not oscillating.. Once booted all controls and indicator LED's on the pendant work as they should.. Once it locked up after running for 45min, But I was poking around the board and I may have caused it...

Anybody have any Ideas on R6502A intermittent or failing to Boot,

Thinking of getting 1.8432 mhz oscillator IC to replace the 74LS14 crystal clock circuit, cheap way to elimiante the crystal as the problem.. Not sure how to wire it in yet, Connect it directly to pin-37 phi-0, Or drive the 74LS14 with it..

Or am I barking at the wrong tree, Could this be a power on reset problem, Would that cause the CPU to freeze in random states, It's such a simple circuit it's hard to imagine it failing..


Second: The Shoulder Stepper Just Vibrates even when the unloaded,
And the two Wrist steppers are supposed to run in unison, but they act like their cross wired.. They run but but the wrist swivels when it should rotate..

None of the Stepper connectors are labeled but the board is, So I have to Trace each steppers wires back to the board to check for cross wiring.. If the Wiring is good then I probably have some fried UDN5707A driver chips, Anybody know a cheap source for these.. lowest I got so far was $15 each, Expensive little devils.. I don't know why they didn't use ULN2803A Darlington Arrays 6 times the current and higher voltage rating... I bought 20 of those for $10.. I guess It saved them some PCB real estate by having the NAND gates inside the driver chip...

I fired Up Diptrace and did the PCB Layout I just have to enter a few Cap and Resistor Values yet.. Then comes the hard part reverse engineering a schematic...

I did find out something I didn't expect, It can move the arm in multiple axis at the same time..

Quick question: Has anyone gotten KiCAD to run in Vista or is it WinXP only..

Does Anyone have any 6502 Component Library's for Diptrace that they would care to post.. There are no 65xx family or motorola 68xx parts in the Diptrace library..

And trying to reverse engineer this board when very little on it is in the Diptrace library is giving me brain Damage..

I've wasted hours trying to figure out the component editor, And I know its supposed to be simple, But I'm missing something cause it's not working for me..


Update: Its Not me, Something went flaky with the program install.. Tried reinstalling it but the editor is still not working right.. It won't let me assign pins and randomly grays out controls.. Tried loading a similar chip renaming it and reassigning the pins as I have done before.. I change 1 or 2 pins and then it stops working.. Schematic and PCB work perfectly..

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When falling from a high place, You might as well try to fly

This was a reply I got to a email suggesting Western Design Center put out a set of library files for for low cost and free PCB editors for their current line of 6502 siblings, To make it easier on hobbyist and low budget designers, And increase interest in their CPU/MPU's and Peripheral Chips..
===================

Hi

Dave Cramer, WDC's new Business Development Manager, will take your advice to heart. We do have libraries here: http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/ ... etools.cfm

Our PCB kits can be translated to these other low cost and/or free tools. Having libraries available with other PCB tools as you suggest would make it easier for you and others to design with our 65xx chips!

Also, you might be interested in that we will soon be making our chips available to hobby/education distributors so that you can purchase our 65xx family of chips in a more convenient way and with your other project components.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Best,
-Bill

William D. Mensch, Jr.
Chairman & CEO
The Western Design Center, Inc.
www.WesternDesignCenter.com
65xx Embedded Intelligence Technology

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When falling from a high place, You might as well try to fly

leeeeee

I bought a TOP2005 china Eprom programmer today on ebay for $20.. I will dump the Microbot Eprom to a file and post it as soon as I get and verify the programmer works properly.. Hope you will share with me any info you can glean from the code..

I would like to get this thing to run both its native code and EhBasic

I have about 1/3 of the memory map worked out, But the I/O addressing of the stepper motor drive is proving to be a nightmare they are latching 6 bits into each of the four 74ls174 chips and one output goes to one input on each of the 4 NAND gates in the six UDN5705 drivers, The other input I haven't worked out yet, It could be clocking to create a PWM control of stepper current or another part of the addressing scheme..

MC1488 & 89 Standard RS232 tranciever circuit

74LS14 is the standard Clock & Reset circuit
Pins 1-2-3-4 Crystal & Clock (Crystal & Caps now removed and pin 1 driven by a 1.8432mhz crystal oscillator)
Pins 5-6 Power on Reset circuit
Pins 9 A15 Pin 8 A15 Inverted (not traced)

NE555 is Charge Pump for -12 for TX on the serial port

75LS251 Addressing (still tracing it out )

74LS259 Latch (still tracing it out)

74LS138 address decoding.. seems their using Phi2 as part of the decoding
A10 to A0
A11 to A1
A12 to A2
A14 to E1
A15 to E2
Phi2 to E3

I haven't tracked the outputs yet because I have been creating a Diptrace schematic as i track the connections, But the lack of 6502 series Library files has stalled my progress..

I Still in need of Diptrace chip library files for the 6502 chip family.. Please Post if anyone has them.. Chip Editor in Diptrace refuses to work, I think some registry errors are causing problems, Remnants from multiple Installs..

I removed the 1.8432 crystal and replaced it with a crystal oscillator

I created a daughter board that plugs into the 32pin Eprom socket with a
628128-70ns with a battery backup which allows data to be saved and read in the eprom programmer and a 128k x 8 -70ns flash chip with 2 74HCT138's and a 8 pole dip switch and a 8 bit addressable latch.. so I can basically play around with address mapping and bank switching

Now just have to work out what I want to load into the Flash Mem besides the original operating system Eprom

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When falling from a high place, You might as well try to fly

Ok I dumped the Eprom from Microbot mainboard and verifid it against the Eprom to a 4096kb bin file..

How do I attach it for posting.... For those who want to poke around the code..

_________________
When falling from a high place, You might as well try to fly

There's no facility for attachments here, but you can paste any ascii format of a ROM into a public paste at pastebin.com, like this: http://pastebin.com/Pd5yZ52r
(which is a micromon for the vic20, in intel hex format)

Cheers
Ed

Or if you want, email me the rom, I can host it on my website for anyone to download, my email is nightmaretony@yahoo.com

_________________
"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

Ok, the rom is now hosted.

http://www.nightmarepark.com/6502.php

Hopefully, we can begin dissembly of it sometime.

_________________
"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

My first go at disassembly is here.

I've also taken a stab at the memory map and I'm guessing it is more than full with each device appearing multiple times and sometimes more than one device at the same location.


The reset code looks like it uses the stack before it sets the stack pointer. As it also uses a lot of page one for general storage it is possible for the reset code to crash the CPU.

Lee.

Tony... Thanks for Posting the PROM

Lee... !!!WOW!! You got all that from the code without having the CPU board, I'm Impressed..

The one bit of a manual I have claims the Unipolar Steppers are run in Half-Step mode with 15 different speeds ranging fro 28 to 650 steps per second with Acel & Decel ramps,, 2 coils then 1 then 2 pattern.. I guess I better map the rest of the stepper circuitry to get a full understanding of its opperation...

As far as Ram goes the manual states it can store 53 movements in sequence with 1k ram and 128 moves with 2k

It seems two stepper drivers UDN5707A's are toast on my robot,, Sense Allegro discontinued the UDN5707A the price is ridiculous at $40 each..

I would eventually like to change the Eprom code to get Step and Direction signals and replace all the outputs with Pololu A4988 Mini Stepper Modules at $12 Each.. I would have to Run the steppers in bipolar mode,, But they are six wire motors so no problem there.. The Allegro A4988 does multiple stepping modes selected by strapping 3 input pins and can handle 2 amps with automatic current limiting,, A NOTE here these run cooler when your close to their max operating voltage because current control is PWM and the higher the voltage the shorter the pulse or on-time...
Its either that or bread boarding Quad 2 in NAND gates with ULN2803 Darlington Arrays for the drivers on DIP headers.. By Pairing outputs I can get four 1 amp outputs per array.. which is 3 times the current the original drivers could handle..

This Link has the TeachVAL II Java Based control program & source code for the TeachMover..
http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~bockusd/TeachVal/TeachValII

The Partial Technical Manual here gives some in site into its operation..
http://www.ctrl-c.liu.se/~magnus/ROBOT.HTMLX

_________________
When falling from a high place, You might as well try to fly

From the code and from the board picture and pdf linked earlier.


The half step table is at LAB_F5A4.


126 steps with 2K RAM.

I've filled in a few more details and updated the archive.

Lee.